The concept of “idol” for the Hebrew Psalmist is much like 
that of Narcissus for the Greek mythmaker. And the Psalmist 
insists that the beholding  of idols, or the use of technology, 
conforms men to them. “They that make them shall be like 
unto them.” This is a simple fact of sense “closure.” The poet 
Blake developed the Psalmist’s ideas into an entire theory of 
communication and social change. It is in his long poem of 
Jerusalem  that he explains why men have become what they 
have beheld. What they have, says Blake, is “the spectre of the 
Reasoning Power in Man” that has become fragmented and 
“separated from Imagination and enclosing itself as in steel.” 
Blake, in a word, sees man as fragmented by his technologies. 
But he insists that these technologies are self-amputations of 
our own organs. When so amputated, each organ becomes a 
closed system of great new intensity that hurls man into 
“martyrdoms and wars.” Moreover, Blake announces as his